Humans created the sentient
robot "boppers," but now it's the boppers who have startedcreating humans. Clones and DNA-splicing
have spawned the meatbop, a human body infused
with the software (the mind and personality) of a bopper. The meatbops are
interested in propagating down on Earth, but that might not be so good for humanity
(the boppers have a nasty habit of enslaving humans, actually). When a couple
of (reasonably) innocent humans get tangled up in the bopper's machinations
on the moon,
it's time
to drag out the stored mind of bopper-creator Cobb Anderson and see if he
can help.

Wetware

"Life is not life, but rock rearranging
itself under the sun."
- Dorion Sagan

On land, direct physical
connections become essential." Water
is no longer ambient,
the medium in which life is immersed, but instead an irrigation system
which connects and passes through all land life. Now the "biota has
had to find ways to carry the sea within it and, moreover, to construct
watery conduits from 'node'
to 'node.'" Land life is literally pleated and plied, complex
It has effectively "taken the sea beyond the sea and folded it back inside
of itself," aseembling itself as a network
of molecular arteries and veins, a hydraulic system keeping life afloat.
"Acting over evolutionarytime
as a rising tide, the land biota literally carries the sea and its distinctive
solutes over the surface of the land" forming a "terrestrial sea"
of "countless and interconnected conduits" which "expands with every increase
in the volume of tissues and sap and lymph of the creatures that constitute
it."

"The land biota represents
not simply life from the sea, but a variation of the sea itself," and living,
land-life fluids "are not a mere remnant or analog of the sea; they
are actually a new type of sea or marine environment: Hypersea."
This continuity of ocean and land is supported by the fuzzy
zones between plants and less complex forms of life: bacteria, algae,
fungi, lichens.

Every computer consists of two aspects,
known as hardware and software. (Software here includes information).

[...]

The software consists of
programs that can exist in many forms, including the totally abstract.
A program can be "in" the computer in the sense that it is recorded in
the CPU or on a disk which is hitched up to the computer. A program can
also exist on a piece of paper, if I invented it myself, or in a manual,
if it is a standard program; in these cases, it is not "in" the computer
but can be put "in" at any time. But a program can be even more tenuous
than that; it can exist only in my head, if I have never written it down,
or if I have used it once and erased it.

The hardware is more "real"
than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time—if
it's not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study, etc.
On the other hand, the software is more "real" in the sense that you can
smash the hardware back to dust ("kill" the computer) and the software
still exists, and can "materialize" or "manifest" again in a different
computer.

(Any speculations about reincarnation
at this point are the responsibility of the reader, not of the author.)

In speaking of the human
brain as an electro-colloidal biocomputer, we all know where the hardware
is: it is inside the human skull. The software, however, seems to be anywhere
and everywhere. For instance, the software "in" my brain also exists outside
my brain in such forms as, say, a book I read twenty years ago, which was
an English translation of various signals transmitted by Plato 2400 years
ago. Other parts of my software are made up of the software of Confucius, James
Joyce, my second-grade teacher, the Three Stooges, Beethoven,
my mother and father, Richard Nixon, my various dogs and cats, Dr.
Carl Sagan, and anybody and (to some extent) any-thing that has ever
impacted upon my brain. This may sound strange, but that's the way software
(or information) functions.

Of course, if consciousness
consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless
software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

We want to know, then, how
out of this universal software ocean a specific person emerges.

What the Thinker thinks,
the Prover proves.

Because the human brain,
like other animal brains, acts as an electro-colloidal computer, not a
solid-state computer, it follows the same laws as other animal brains.
That is, the programs get into the brain, as electro-chemical bonds, in
discrete quantum
stages.